Who will win this year’s Taite Music Prize?

The Taite Music Prize - named after the legendary music journalist Dylan Taite - honours the most creative Kiwi album of the year.

Ideal Home Noise - a collection of songs about "love and strife between myself and myself' - won Wellington songwriter Vera Allen the prestigious prize (which includes $12,500 cash) last year.

The ten homegrown albums in the running for the 2025 Taite Prize explore self-restoration, turning 50, the joy of the dancefloor and much more.

In alphabetical order, they are:

Anna Coddington - Te Whakamiha (Loop Recordings)

Anna Coddington (Ngāti Tūwharetoa / Te Arawa) first released original songs in te reo Māori on the 2021 EP 'Mana-Wā-Hine'.

After a harsh serving of Long Covid took away her voice, the Auckland songwriter celebrates "Māori funk" on her first bilingual album Te Whakamiha.

"Music's always been like emotional processing for me and very cathartic. But I just wanted to really lean into this [more lighthearted] aspect of it," ​Coddinfmorngton told Music 101.

 

DARTZ - Dangerous Day To Be A Cold One (Flying Nun Records)

In 2021, Wellington rock band DARTZ won over Aotearoa with their track 'Bathsalts'.

Their second album Dangerous Day to Be A Cold One -  number 1 on the NZ album charts not once but twice - is inspired by summers in the Bay of Plenty where two band members grew up.

"It's very small town-coded, summer driving, relaxed… We wanted to encapsulate all of New Zealand in a record in the vein of Th' Dudes, '70s and '80s rock bands from New Zealand,", DARTZ told Music 101.

 

Delaney Davidson - Out Of My Head (Rough Diamond)

Lyttelton songwriter Delaney Davidson was approaching his 50th birthday and doing a lot of "pondering and thinking" when he wrote the songs on his tenth album Out Of My Head.

"I always wanted to make this album you would wake up on Sunday morning, and you would put this album and you know, drink some coffee, slowly eat some food, just take it easy, live in the Sunday morning world," he told Music 101.

 

Earth Tongue - Great Haunting (Red Records)

Sixties sci-fi movies inspired Wellington rock duo Earth Tongue's debut album Floating Being. Their follow-up Great Haunting is a tribute to horror movies from the '70s and '80s.

Gussie Larkin and Ezra Simons - also a couple - started writing heavy songs together for fun, then discovered Earth Tongue's catchy riffs had cross-genre appeal.

"We figured out this heavy formula and then we fell in love with it and kept doing it… people seem to like it," says Simons.

 

Fazerdaze - Soft Power (Buttry Records)

In the eight years since releasing her debut album Morningside, Christchurch musician Amelia Murray (aka Fazerdaze) has learned a lot about balancing gentleness with "fierce boundaries".

"I felt so conditioned through my 20s just trying to appease everyone and make everybody happy around me. Soft Power is about kind of shedding that stuff and finding something within me that's kind of unrelated to the external world and crafting my own version of womanhood and adulthood," she told Music 101.

 

Georgia Lines - The Rose Of Jericho (independent release)

Mount Maunganui songwriter Georgia Lines was emerging from a tough time when she wrote her debut album Rose of Jericho, which is inspired by a flower known for its powers of self-restoration, not its beauty.

"I am in the process of coming back to life, remembering things that were lost and all of the things associated with that … my record was the rose inside," she told Afternoons.

• Watch Georgia Lines chatting about Rose of Jericho here.
   

Holly Arrowsmith - Blue Dreams (Leather Jacket Records)

Born in the New Mexico desert and raised in the Southern Alps, Holly Arrowsmith is now balancing the two roles of musician and mother.

On her second album Blue Dreams, the Christchurch-based songwriter doesn't shy away from her struggles with identity and mental health.

"All of a sudden I was just a lady with a pram and I had to kind of claw my way through to find out who I was again", she told Music 101.

 

Mel Parsons - Sabotage (Cape Road Recordings)

Lyttelton songwriter Mel Parsons used crowdfunding to record her sixth album Sabotage.

"It's a really big morale boost because it reminds there is an audience and they want to hear you," Parsons told Afternoons.

• Listen to a live performance here.

 

MOKOTRON - WAEREA (Sunreturn)

Mokotron is the moniker of electronic musician and academic Tiopira McDowell (Ngāti Hine).

His live shows, which with taonga puoro (traditional Maori instruments), heavy breakbeats and sub-bass, are a "spiritual" experience, McDowell says, where men are encouraged to express their feelings.

"Right from my first gig people were often on the edge of tears ... I think I've just dug into that and just gone with it," he told Music 101.

 

Troy Kingi - Leatherman & the Mojave Green (AllGood Absolute Alternative Records)

To make Leatherman and the Mojave Green, Kerikeri songwriter Troy Kingi travelled all the way to the California desert.

Why? Because the infamous Rancho De La Luna recording studio was the perfect setting to go "full force straight into the desert rock vibe", Kingi says.

"I'm so happy with it," he told Music 101.

• Watch Troy Kingi take on the Californian desert in the RNZ video series Desert Hikoi here.

 

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